Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755884Ab1FHNil (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Jun 2011 09:38:41 -0400 Received: from li9-11.members.linode.com ([67.18.176.11]:40151 "EHLO test.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755082Ab1FHNik (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Jun 2011 09:38:40 -0400 Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2011 09:38:33 -0400 From: "Ted Ts'o" To: John Kacur Cc: Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG , david@lang.hm, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: XFS problem in 2.6.32 Message-ID: <20110608133833.GD30037@thunk.org> Mail-Followup-To: Ted Ts'o , John Kacur , Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG , david@lang.hm, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <4DEE1D96.6020208@profihost.ag> <6D8DA3D2-D90B-4D82-BDC9-C3F0264A68BF@mit.edu> <4DEE2C70.8060301@profihost.ag> <4DEE9EDA.90001@profihost.ag> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@thunk.org X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on test.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2903 Lines: 64 On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 10:00:39AM +0200, John Kacur wrote: > Ok, I don't speak for my company, and your point about not expecting > people to do this work for you is valid, however I don't see why you > need to take potshots at Red Hat It wasn't a potshot; if it is true, it is a completely rational economic argument that is completely within the bounds of the requirements of the GPL, and with LKML community standards. The reason why I say it is because of (a) http://lwn.net/Articles/430098/, and (b) a few months ago, when I quietly floated starting a new long-term stable kernel series that a number of companies would maintain cooperatively, I was told, privately, that such a proposal would not likely be received positively by Red Hat management because of the reasons behind the policy instituted by (a). Which is fine, I don't consider that a potshot, no more than I consider the fact that IBM forked the OpenOffice before it was relicensed to the LGPL and made changes which they didn't give back, and seems to be actively supporting Oracle's attempt to get Apache to adopt OpenOffice.org inspite of the currently healthy LibreOffice LGPL3 branch which already has an active community to be a potshot. Both are completely legal things set by the ground rules of the copyright licenses involvled, and someone no less than Linus has said that the ability to fork is healthy because it keeps people honest. > - they are quite active in the stable effort. > > wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.38.8 > grep Author ChangeLog-2.6.38.8 | grep -i redhat | wc -l > 9 > > grep Author ChangeLog-2.6.38.8 | grep -i suse | wc -l > 10 > > grep Author ChangeLog-2.6.38.8 | grep -i canonical | wc -l > 5 > > I'm not even claiming that these are typical stats, but as just a > quick check on your statement, the contributions for one stable > release are in the same ballpark as everyone else. Nah, that just means that commits which are labelled with "CC: stable@vger.kernel.org" are automatically accepted into stable kernel series. If you can point efforts where painful backports of ext4 and xfs bug fixes into RHEL 6.x are making it back into 2.6.32.y, even though in some cases it takes tens of hours of engineering and QA efforts, we can talk. But please note that I wasn't calling out Red Hat as being bad or evil by doing what they are doing; it is completely economically rational and allowed by the GPL rules for them to be doing what they are doing. (Just as what Android has been doing with their constant forward porting of the Wakelocks API is completely within the GPL rules.) - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/